Sassari - Shopping

Shopping in 2050:

• Location?

• Shopping trends

• Prediction for shopping in 2050?

• Our future vision

Sassari, in the northern part of the Italian island of Sardinia is a small yet very important settlement place, being the second largest city containing approximately 300,000 inhabitants within and around the city. Italy has always been centered on design, art and food. The Piazza has been the point to showcase all of these elements, this has created a culture of shopping where people congregate and parade them selves within the Piazza. The vision is positioned in the major shopping street within the heart of Sassari – Viale italia.

Global shopping trends are predicted to change, where spaces become more mixed in use. Throughout Europe new modes of shopping are changing in function. The Prada store in Tokyo is about pleasure and communication, to encourage the meshing of consumption and culture. Many café’s in London are now become working spaces where people can bring their computer to work, and no longer need an office space. 24-hour vending machine shops offer food, drinks, rentals, clothes, gadgets and more on demand without the service of shop assistants.

Predictions for 2050 present challenges for managing an increasing world population (where in 2050, 75% of the world’s population is to be living in urban areas), depleting food/water resources, unemployment, mobility within cities, increasing on-average global temperatures, reliance on non renewable energies and social segregation. This vision focuses on how shopping can function while meeting these challenges, such as 'in-home' office spaces and urban farming, managed by local residents providing an incentive to produce and eat locally, reducing transport and energy demands while also providing an income.

Today's urban structure of Sassari is the result of growth occurred in a very short time frame. The main commercial places of the city is in the suburban area, so the idea is to bring it in the centre of social life: viale Italia. Here there are many public services and the main flow of people during the day.

Today in 2011, the ‘Piazza’ (Square) is losing significance with the introduction of larger commercial shopping centers and the power of the internet that allows people to stay at home and aquire things faster. While these elements provide advantages such as convenience and efficiency, the culture of congregation and interaction of people in the street is being lost.

In 2050 it is hoped that the Piazza can facilitate both the historic function of the traditional Italian Piazza while also adapting to the pressures of technology and a changing lifestyle so that a new way of shopping can be created, whereby it is not necessary to go to the street to buy/consume goods/services, but can become an experience that brings people together, thus creating a hub for social, economical and cultural exchanges.

In our first vision of 2050 we represented interactive structures, multi-funtional buildings that connected to each other. We created the "Piazza" with a new market system where people can interact as they pass through the Piazza with different activities. We removed the commercial shopping centre and replaced it with a structure incorporating residential living spaces, offices and multi-functional shops that were more open to people passing by. We modified the old school to the right, changing it to a museum. Parts of the piazza were incorporated with the museum with contemporary installations.

For the third vision we analyzed solar radiation and created structures to control the amount of solar radiation and rainfall reaching the Piazza

Individual typologies:

• Market: The market changed during the years in his structure, functions and products, from the ancient agorà to the markets, to the arcades, to the department stores and finally to the last shopping malls. It will change in the future with new installations than will allow a better perception and living of common spaces. New forms can interact with each other but also with the others buildings. First of all I chose to study three different tipology: coverage structure with the shop in its trunk and boxes like shop/storage that i can put under the ground or like a parassite on the facades of the others buildings when I don't have to use it. Later I thought about a deformable capsular form that would allow the hospitability of the most varied functions: cuboctahedron. with this regular form people (shopper,customers, or simply people that are walking in the square) can model the square and living it because is possile to roll up the cuboctahedron structure in order meet the immediate requirements. These structures can also stay inside the building on the left overlooking the square.

• Urban Farming: This five storey building has been added on top of an existing eight storey apartment complex that is thirty meters wide. Four families can occupy three levels each. They each have their own area of land to produce local fruit, vegetable, fish, chicken and eggs. The family also has an office space meaning less pressure to produce a separate office space in another part of the city. The neighboring area can purchase produce from the families creating an incentive for these families to produce more efficiently. On the ground level of the new structure is a free gymnasium, the only cost is the energy of people that is generated by each person using the equipment. In this way people can get a workout while they provide the building with a source of energy. There is a cafe providing free food and drinks for gym users, the more energy they can produce for the building, the more they can aquire from the cafe. Only the food produced by in/on the building is served at this cafe. The building can rotate by the stron mistral winds coming from the north west of Sardinia allowing even distribution of solar radiation/protection to each household.

• Multi-functional structures: According to the main idea of the project, the principal aim of the building that I had create is to solve the problem of depopulation of the city center due to the positioning of many services related to shopping and leisure in its suburban areas, causing a sequential impoverishment of the public space, the decentralization of services, and so having in this way an urban area not very compact and indented, with a subsequent loss of space and resources. the building forwards until it meets the original bus line and rises high for five floors. it hosting shopping area for the first two floors, offices on the third floor, apartments, gym and common areas on the top floors. Everything will work 24 hours on 24, in anticipation of a future life more hectic and intense, and so as to meet the needs of the citizens of the future. in the side overlooking the square, the building creates a sort of covered square. The facade overlooking the square is in part made of glass and in part green facade.

• Technology: The square hosts the school that takes the form of a ramp that goes down underground. This creates in its middle an open courtyard visible from the top of the square. There are a series of capsules in the ramp that can be laboratory work during the day where students can conduct their activities creative studio, the evening these laboratories are used as shops or spaces in which exhibit the products that are designed and worked in the morning, the railing of the ramp acts as a deforming interactive screen that projects images of products created to serve as a shop window, so people can visit the building as a museum being able to decide whether to purchase products or simply to observe the work in the evening through the use of a ladder as a staircase you can create an air display projection. accross the square there is a canal that ends near of the cave. This is to channel rainwater and make it falling like a waterfall in the courtyard.